Latest / The Ric and Dan Show / "My life has been a 200-mile-an-hour journey": Ricky Craven of Bar Harbor Bank and Trust Speedway

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"My life has been a 200-mile-an-hour journey": Ricky Craven of Bar Harbor Bank and Trust Speedway · The Ric and Dan Show

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Guests of the Rick and Dan show sign a waiver, and then we bless them with these fabulous
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parting gifts from our sponsor, Coffee Hound Coffee.
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What are those three words, Dan?
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They are Wander, Explore, Caffeinate.
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Coffee Hound Coffee Company at coffeehoundcoffeeco.com.
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Thank you, Chris Keegan.
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What are you doing Saturday night?
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Me?
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How are you with left hand turns?
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No, I don't want him driving.
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Oh, yeah.
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No, I don't want him anywhere near the track.
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I want him calling the race.
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Oh, you reeled that off.
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That was great.
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Ah, Saturday.
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Well, hey, you know, for a fee.
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He's Rick Tyler, and he's Dan Cashman.
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I'm Ricky Craven from Bar Harbor Bank and Trust Speedway, and I'm on the Rick and Dan
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show.
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In Maine, we often hear, you can't get there from here.
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These are the stories of the risk takers, the trailblazers, those who turn obstacles
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into opportunities every day and found their way to get there from here.
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And today, they're on the Rick and Dan show.
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Do you ever go to Jiffy Lube and tell the people to hurry up?
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You got to be somewhere?
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I change my own oil.
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Do you?
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Really?
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Change your own tires?
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No, I thought it sounded good.
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I try hard to be humble, but I'm not that humble.
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I don't have any time.
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I would change my own oil.
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I'd change your oil.
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But the world I'm in right now is sort of what I'm used to.
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I do not believe I'm 60.
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I feel 30.
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And my life has been a 200 mile an hour journey.
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It really has.
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I'm at my worst when things come to a crawl.
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I love having volumes of things being directed at me, and I love the noise.
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I love the action.
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That's why when I was four years old sitting in the grandstands at Speedway 95, I knew exactly
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what I wanted to do.
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I wanted to do what my dad was doing that night.
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He won the heat race, the semi feature, and the feature.
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That following Monday, it said, Alan Craven wins the triple crown at Speedway.
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Put it in reverse just for a second and go back.
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And if we had to set a GPS to take us from Newburgh to NASCAR, what would that routing
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look like?
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In my world, I don't want this to sound arrogant, but it would be lower left, upper right.
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I started on the lower left hand corner of the piece of paper, kind of like a chart of
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the S&P 500 over the last 75 years.
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It wasn't perfectly linear, like a straight line at all.
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It was higher highs and higher lows.
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More like reading, got defibrillators on somebody, and you know, like reading that.
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Watching the EKG.
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EKG, yeah.
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EKG, right.
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Yeah.
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It wasn't easy, and it wasn't obvious, but essentially win and move on.
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And if I won, I moved to the next division, even if it meant a geographic relocation.
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And I did that until I was 40.
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Did you know what that path looked like when you were in Newburgh, or did you have to sort
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of adjust and call a lot of audibles along the way?
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A lot of audibles.
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Excellent question, because you need a lot of ingredients, but two things that are front
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and center.
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Number one, you have to be resilient.
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You're going to lose a lot more than you win.
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And you have to be very creative, flexible, or you know, what's the alternative?
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And I don't want to say plan B, because I did chart my course in that I knew where I
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wanted to be, and I had a vision of how I was going to get there.
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But there were many times where I was at an intersection, and if I didn't know to turn
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left or right, and I say that as a metaphor, if I didn't know to turn left or right, am
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I supposed to turn left or right?
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I did the logical thing and went straight, so that I was continuing to move forward.
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Always moving forward.
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Yeah.
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Not stopping.
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Yeah.
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I don't know that I really ever stopped.
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I think I ran a lot of stop signs.
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You say, and I think it's with almost anyone's career, your career, Dan, my career, you
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lose more than you win.
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But some people get defined by their loss.
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How do you learn from disappointment and not get defined by our losses?
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In everything we do, and this is all growing older, and you know, the wisdom that comes
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with age, because what I'm telling you now didn't make sense at 20, and what I discovered
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at 40 made no sense at 30.
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But the answer to the question is, you damn well better know why you lost.
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If you do not know why you lost, you'll continue losing.
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Conversely, same, but a completely different formula.
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If you win and you don't know why or how you won, you got lucky.
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So I think it's the same in life.
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I mean, I think that you get what you give and you have to surround yourself with good
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people.
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You create a culture.
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The culture defines sort of principally the attitude of the organization or what the potential
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is.
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A lot of optimism.
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If there's one thing that you have to know about me, the first 15 years of my life, I
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was around pessimism, and that is not a reflection of my family.
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It's a reflection of the difficulty of, you know, there's not a lot of prosperity in Newburgh.
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There wasn't for me.
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I grew up on a small farm and just, you know, the environment, there wasn't a lot of prosperity.
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And I remember my dad parking his truck behind the house and not understanding it, and eventually
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coming to light that he was parking it out there so they couldn't find it to repossess
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it.
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Oh my goodness.
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I mean, it was, that is how I remember some of my childhood.
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And I had a great childhood, but I say great because I'm an optimist.
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And if there's one thing I can share with young people that are paying attention, your
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destination is exponentially higher, better, more rewarding if you go through life optimistic.
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If you go through life with a glass half empty every day, you've predetermined your
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fate.
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I wish you told me that 50 years ago.
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No, I don't think so.
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Where did you get the optimism if you were surrounded by pessimism?
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I guess first, did you always have it?
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Were you just sort of inherently optimistic?
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And secondly, where did that come from?
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Where did it stem from?
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I think, I mean, I can't answer the chicken or the egg thing, right?
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I think most of what you get is inherent, and I think that you can acquire skills.
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That's what we call investing in yourself, which I've done and continue to do.
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But my grandmother was a very special lady, and everybody who came to visit my grandparents
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on my mom's side took food home.
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Then nobody left without food.
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It was crazy.
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And my grandmother cooked on a wood stove, and I mean, very much like, I mean, very,
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very blue collar.
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On my dad's side, they took family photos in the parlor.
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I didn't realize how contrasting it was until I was exposed to a different life, which was
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pretty early in my life, you know, in my teens, because I was racing Quebec, Montreal, Cincinnati,
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Nashville.
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So when I got outside of my bubble or my perimeter, but I mean, across the Portsmouth Bridge and
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saw things that were just a little bit different, and then very curious.
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I've sort of fostered that with my children.
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Gotta ask questions.
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That served me very well.
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And I still wear people out.
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I'm going to wear you out today.
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I ask questions.
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Why?
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Why?
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Okay.
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I need to understand things.
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Unity, Wiscasset, Oxford, Speedway 95.
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I wonder about racing those main tracks and what you learned that helped you when you
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got to national tracks and the lights were brighter.
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Very little.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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So I learned fundamentals.
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Okay.
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And those are the things you do with your feet and your hands.
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The reason it was important for me to, if I had success, move on is so that I didn't
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become stagnant or complacent and just pick up bad habits.
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I will tell you that fundamentally, a race car driver is a race car driver, but you don't
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play on a basketball court the same size and dimension, 10 foot basket everywhere you
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go.
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I was racing on third mile tracks.
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Biggest track was a half mile and then we, Bob Bear builds New Hampshire Motor Speedway
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and it's like, that was a blessing.
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You talk about planets aligning, like I was there helping build that in my own mind.
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And I lived in Concord, New Hampshire when it was being built and I was there like every
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other day and I won the track championship.
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I won, I think the second race, third race that was ever run there.
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Because I knew I had to adapt to those bigger tracks, higher speed, and every one of those
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tracks is a different discipline and requires different inputs.
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Your sensory, like what makes you an athlete or a talent, your sensory tells you where your
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breaking points are, where your turning points are.
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But as an athlete, as a driver, you have to constantly evaluate what is the limit of
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my car today.
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On the cup level that we had 14 cars to choose from, if one got wrecked, I built a new one.
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But we always had a stable of like 14 horses and we chose a specific car for a specific
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track.
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And you had to learn the limit of that car.
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You also had to understand the limit of the racetrack, which was constantly changing.
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Like a fresh, clean racetrack has a lot of grip.
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An hour into the race, you're sliding, so you have to change your line.
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You have to change how deep you drive into the corner or where you pick up the gas.
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And then you're constantly with your hard drive evaluating yourself like, you know,
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what are your limits today?
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Like are you on your game?
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And maybe you're struggling with something and you just can't get past it.
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It's a personality of your car and the car says, I'm not, I don't want any of that.
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I can't do that.
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You're asking me to go in the corner at 212 miles an hour and change directions and I'm
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not going to do it.
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And you argue with your car, with your feet and you wrestle the car with your hands and
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you change your line instead of going in, in the second groove and putting some weight
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on the right front to help turn the car.
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Maybe you throw the car on the right rear tire on the very high line that has more banking,
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more support, but it's a longer way around.
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You've made the track longer, but you can maintain three or four miles per hour more
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going in the corner and not have to lift through the center.
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So that's the comprehension of what a driver does for three and a half or four hours.
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That is fascinating.
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It blew my mind.
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Yeah.
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And this, this sport has been fascinating to me for a long time.
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I think it actually started with you.
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I was not, I guess, aware, too aware of it until I was aware of you.
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So thank you for opening my eyes to it, first of all.
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But secondly, what has fascinated me about it is the leading up to racing.
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I know that I was a kid, I played wiffle ball and farm league and little league.
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I'm not a major league ball player, but I know that's how people get started.
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And you start playing street basketball, you play youth ice hockey.
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I don't know what that path is for this sport.
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How do you go from watching to driving two hundred and twelve miles an hour and having
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the instincts to do it well?
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Very similar to every major athlete or talent, musician, pilot.
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It's created or fostered in something you experience or read about or you're exposed
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to.
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And in my case, it was my dad driving at Speedway 95 and the same grandstands that I acquired.
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I mean, literally the same thing.
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Do you carve your initials into one of them?
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Look, it's me, R.C.
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I mean, oh, that was fun.
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I love that racetrack, but, you know, some of it is almost retro.
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It is retro and a different flavor.
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And I sat there and watched my dad race and compete and I knew what I wanted to do.
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I know that for certain.
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I didn't talk about it, but when I was 15 years old, I had actually 13 years old.
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I convinced my parents to buy this car.
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It was a 1970 Chevelle and it had a roll cage in it and it was sitting in a field.
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And I said, it's crazy that that car is just sitting there.
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That could be a beautiful race car.
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But nobody finished it.
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I remember they paid $150 for it and it was one of the best investments they made because
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I couldn't wait to get home, get off the school bus and work on that car.
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And 13, 14, 15, 16, you can find trouble or trouble could find you.
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And I never got in any trouble because I was working on that car.
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Eventually, I recruited my buddies to help me work on that car.
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Again, things I wish you'd said to me 50 years ago.
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Yeah, yeah.
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It worked out pretty well, Rick.
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But that's like principally that would be the first start.
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Like Charlotte, as an example, Steph Curry.
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I watched him at Davidson and it was very apparent actually before that in a private
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school in Charlotte.
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But his dad was a big time player for the Charlotte Hornets and I think he had the record
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for three pointers for years.
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Like he was the real deal.
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I didn't know that.
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And then Steph and his brother were legitimate players.
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I mean, Steph for Davidson.
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Wow.
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He took that tiny little private school in Davidson, North Carolina to the lead eight
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and was one shot away from going to the final four.
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And then of course, it became obvious when he got to the NBA, right?
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But it's never obvious.
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No.
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Along the way.
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Yeah.
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Do you ever get tired of talking about 2003 in Darlington?
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No, because prior to that, a lot of people wanted to talk about breaking my back at Talladega.
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Like really, like that's what moves us are those moments.
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And I have one.
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When I was a kid, it was Carlton Fisk hitting the home run in 75.
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Like I had two heroes.
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I had Richard Petty and Carlton Fisk.
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And I don't know that Carlton Fisk wasn't at least parallel with the King.
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Those moments.
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2003 was a moment.
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And I knew it almost immediately.
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And I'll tell you why.
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Yeah.
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How?
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Yeah.
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Because nobody left.
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Like there is a cannonball run at every major event for people wanting to get out and beat
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the traffic.
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My grandfather was like that at every sporting event.
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Didn't matter.
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So when you win a race and you think, God, I've wanted to win here more than any other
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track because it's the track too tough to tame, you know, 200 miles an hour on the corner
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entry, that close to the wall, it is literally you against the track every lap.
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You can't say that about every other race course.
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It's you against the other drivers.
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I mean, if you're at a track that's easy enough to run two, three, some racetracks like Michigan,
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you can run four wide.
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It's not the degree of difficulty there the way it's the degree of difficulty at Darlington.
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So you look at the list and I knew of this.
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I was very, it was very apparent to me.
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The guys who made Darlington what Darlington is were named Petty, Pearson, Earnhardt, Gordon.
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The guys who won there, won there a lot.
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And the guys that were good and wanted to win there, some of them didn't win.
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Tony Stewart never won there.
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I mean, that's one that just pops to mind, but you know, Tony Stewart was a hell of a racer.
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I mean, he was one of the generational drivers.
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And winning the Daytona 500, winning the Brickyard 400, winning the Coke 600, those are, those
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are marquee wins.
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Winning Darlington would be in that.
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Like Kurt Busch and I were involved in that and Kurt Busch is a lifelong Cubs fan, a Red
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Sox fan.
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And we both talked about this a lot, that like playing at Fenway and playing at Wrigley
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is just a little different.
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And Darlington is the same way.
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To a racer, to my industry, Darlington is Fenway.
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It is different than any other track.
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And you either love the Green Monster as a left fielder or you despise it.
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And a lot of people despise, a lot of drivers despise Darlington.
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Kyle Petty, long before I even got acquainted to Darlington, said, I hate this place.
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I always hate this place and I'll never run well here.
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And he was right.
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Speedway 95, you acquired the same bleachers that you sat on.
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How special is that for you?
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Yeah, it's part of the cause.
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And I am sincerely still trying to catch up with myself because bought it wasn't as difficult
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as I thought because Dell and I had entertained the idea of him selling it to me a couple
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times.
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It fell apart in the ninth inning both times.
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This time it happened a little bit, you know, we were both pretty forceful about it.
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And I think it's because he was ready and I was ready.
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But since that moment where I said, OK, I actually own it, I have not lifted, meaning
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not that I've done all the work, but every day I've been consumed with it.
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And it required me to, I mean, there's some casualty to it because I had a business in
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North Carolina and I have my three children in the Carolinas, two grandchildren in the
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Carolinas and I just basically, I abandoned ship.
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I really did and I've been selling stuff ever since.
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So I've got to catch up with myself.
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But the real hurdle was opening day.
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It was in October, November, December, all through the winter.
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And we got a bit of a rehearsal because we opened and it began raining and it was a curse
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and a blessing all in one.
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I would score us a four on one to 10 on June 6th.
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They're just many things that I wasn't pleased with, but could do nothing about.
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And then this past weekend, we were an eight.
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I mean, and I don't, I don't, I've never given a 10 for anything in my life.
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Told my wife she was a 10, but we got divorced and I was going to wonder, do we need to edit
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this part out right here?
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She's still a 10, she's still a 10, okay.
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So an eight is very high.
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It's double what we were seven days earlier.
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So when I say it was a curse, it was because, oh no, I do not want to rain out our opening
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day, debut, and we could, all we needed was not to rain and we were going to finish.
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We were in high gear.
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But it was less than perfect.
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There were things that we didn't get to do and fireworks as an example, but small, there
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was a dozen things that could have been done better.
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And a week later, we did 10 of those 12 things better.
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And we, I think we deserve an eight.
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Who's in your pit crew that has helped you make this move and turn this Speedway back
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into a racing icon?
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Curtis Samard, president, CEO of Barber Bank and Trust.
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And he won't like that I said that, but we both have to accept our roles.
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And my role is to take this through the next 10 years.
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That's what I signed on for when I bought the track.
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Everybody that's associated with me, and they are the ones who deserve all the credit, the
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team, they deserve all the attention on a weekly basis and even to some degree an annual
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basis, but they might not be with me year two, three, four, five.
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I mean, we don't know.
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That's the initial plan, but Curtis will be, and the Barber Bank and Trust will be.
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That came out of nowhere.
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I wanted and needed a naming rights sponsor that I could expand the expectations of Speedway
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and amplify our effect, but I didn't expect it and didn't think it was attainable until
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year three or four, because we were starting from such a low base.
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That's not a knock on anyone, but that's reality.
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Anybody that had been out there in the last couple of years understands.
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It hadn't fallen on ruins, but whatever comes before that.
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And then with Curtis and I connecting, and we had a four hour and 50 minute meeting on
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Friday, which was our first meeting.
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He has a deep rooted history in racing and is very tangible, like he has a lot of knowledge,
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but he has a career that exceeds that ceiling of racing.
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And he's incorporated some really magical things in doing on racing.
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We were fortunate enough that we connected before I connected or he connected with another
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track or vice versa.
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And as a result, he and the Barber Bank and Trust created an inertia that maybe we weren't
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quite prepared for.
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You see what I mean?
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It created a momentum that I was worried, can we capitalize on this momentum in year
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one because we haven't assembled a team?
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In fact, I didn't have a bench.
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I said, all right, I can assemble enough to play the game, but what if we need a relief
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pitcher or what if the shortstop twists that ankle?
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And that went into like January, February, March.
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In fact, I'm still building out the bench, but we have a good team.
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I'm proud of what I saw last week.
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And a big part of that is Barber Bank and Trust.
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We talk on this podcast a lot about business leaders and the challenges they've overcome.
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And I feel like there are people out there, if they run into a challenge, run into a roadblock,
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there's something that just tells them to stop.
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I don't know if it's a safe zone.
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I don't know if it's just the way their brain's wired, but you kept going.
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What made you keep going through all of those challenges?
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It's an awareness that I have today that I didn't have then.
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And I will tell you, I am very transparent.
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I enjoy it.
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I learned it at ESPN that it was safer for me to be brutally honest than it was to take
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the risk of being not 100% real, but sugarcoat things, make sure I didn't offend my buddies
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that I raced with for years.
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So my wife says to me years ago, after my injuries driving the bud car, she said, your
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expectations are just unreasonable.
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And she said it forcefully, which is only five, one and three quarters.
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I mean, beautiful lady, small but mighty and very intellectual, which I like.
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I like that in anybody I meet.
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So when she said it and the way she said it, it stopped me in my tracks.
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More than a 400 pound MMA guy could stop me, really.
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I mean, stop me.
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I said, okay.
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What are you talking about?
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And she goes, your expectations, they're just ridiculously impossible of everything and everyone.
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And what was happening was after I got hurt driving the bud car, I pushed and pushed and
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pushed and pushed and I pushed everybody around me and I was dealing with something that couldn't
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be pushed, a head injury.
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And I get emotional talking about it because it was an ugly time in my life.
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But Dr. Taney at Chapel Hill told me, we can put your arm in a cast.
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You broke your scapula and that's a big bone.
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It was no problem fixing that.
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But the brain is primitive.
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We just don't know a lot about how to repair a bruise or a contusion or anything that's
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going on.
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A lot of it is just data that we have to collect and move forward from it.
24:00
And I went through this deal where I was introduced to a vestibular issue, had no idea what the
24:06
hell a vestibular was, and I didn't know until I didn't have it.
24:10
And I had a 44% right ear vestibular to my left ear.
24:16
That was the ear that was bleeding.
24:18
Blood was coming from my right ear.
24:21
And the transport to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, I woke up in a helicopter having hit
24:26
concrete at 190 miles an hour and I had lost my vision.
24:31
I knew I was in trouble.
24:33
I didn't know where I was.
24:34
I heard the prop of the helicopter and it was a major alternate route.
24:42
Like I didn't plan on taking that path.
24:44
Re-routing.
24:45
Yeah.
24:45
GPS is re-routing.
24:47
Yeah.
24:47
So it wasn't the path less traveled, which I like.
24:52
I like that.
24:54
It was a route that took me way off of the track and into a sand trap or a muddy road
25:03
and I just had to fight my way through it.
25:06
My wife made that declaration because I was miserable.
25:10
Miserable to be around.
25:11
Miserable to deal with.
25:14
So I was sitting on boat, Moosehead Lake, my kids jumping off the back of the boat.
25:19
My wife's reading a book and she said, God, you're still in a bad place.
25:25
And I said, you know what day it is?
25:27
And she said, it's Sunday.
25:28
And I said, yeah, they're racing.
25:30
They were racing in Michigan.
25:33
And I belong there and I had no idea they could race without me is what I was telling
25:40
her.
25:40
Like this, something about this is wrong.
25:43
I can't figure it out and I have to figure it out.
25:46
And then she said, I just read a paragraph, great quote that you need to remember because
25:52
this is you.
25:53
Tough times don't last.
25:56
Tough people do.
25:58
And I have it written in everything I do.
26:00
You know, like some people might not be inspired by that.
26:04
But my Newberg main DNA is tough times don't last.
26:09
Tough people do.
26:11
A lot has changed in NASCAR.
26:14
Things are safer.
26:16
There are technical changes.
26:17
I had to look this up and read about this to frame this question.
26:21
What has changed NASCAR for the better and what do we miss?
26:26
Because it's gone away.
26:27
You guys are pretty damn good.
26:30
I'm serious because you just set me up for what's going to be, it has the potential to
26:36
be controversial or at least conflicting.
26:39
I'm sitting with Ken Squire on the beach having breakfast.
26:44
Ken Squire was one of my favorite people and he called the races for three, four decades.
26:50
Daytona 500, 1979.
26:53
That was, I think, the greatest viewership that they had in like 30 years.
26:59
So I'm sitting there with him having breakfast 2004 and he said, you know, we're making the
27:05
sport too safe.
27:07
And I said, wait a minute.
27:11
I got helicoptered out twice.
27:14
You're talking to the wrong guy.
27:16
And he said, no, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, we are dancing on the pin of a needle.
27:24
And he said, buy the book, The Limit.
27:28
And I did.
27:29
I had the time and I read the book.
27:32
It's great.
27:33
You read it and you understand that the principle of the book was that it was Phil Hill, the
27:39
only American born Formula One champion.
27:42
Mario Andretti was not American born.
27:44
He was Italian, but he was American.
27:46
But when he won the championship, but Phil Hill was the only champion born in the United
27:51
States and he had this battle with Von Trips, German driver.
27:56
I believe it was 61.
27:56
But in that year, they lost like 18 Formula One drivers.
28:03
And in 1961, they didn't race with belts.
28:05
The drivers thought it was less dangerous, safer, if you will, to race without seatbelts
28:11
because they were constantly erupting in flame.
28:15
They'd go.
28:16
Yeah.
28:16
I used that excuse when I was a kid.
28:18
Yeah.
28:19
Honest to God.
28:19
This is real stuff.
28:21
You talk about evolution.
28:22
This is real stuff.
28:23
Right.
28:23
Yeah.
28:23
And they felt like many drivers got trapped underneath the car with their belts on and
28:28
couldn't get out before it erupted in flame.
28:31
And so they raced without the belts, maybe a lap belt, but not to harness the 4.5 point.
28:37
And there were two, 300 people at every stop in Formula One.
28:43
And it wasn't until I read the book that I got a real, real understanding, a deep understanding
28:49
of what might have gotten lost since we lost Earnhardt in that we lost four drivers that
28:58
year and we needed change because the cars had become fast and triangulated strong enough.
29:07
They were super fast and they were super rigid, very, very strong roll cage.
29:14
Consequently, what was happening is that the driver, the human, was absorbing way too much
29:19
of the impact and because of the strength of the car and the human body was failing.
29:26
We hadn't lost a driver since Dale Earnhardt at the highest level of NASCAR.
29:30
And that's a blessing for the families and for everybody that's connected to the sport
29:35
and has, you know, as tethered to the sport.
29:38
But we've also lost, we have lost attendance.
29:43
And so we're talking from two completely different perspectives.
29:50
I'm talking from each of them, right?
29:53
They are directly opposing one another.
29:55
But if you go back to the 90s.